I'd like to build my own Linux distro based on Fedora 16. I don't want to make a "custom spin" though. I'd like this to be somewhat of a fork that wouldn't contain any Fedora references (like CentOS, or Scientific Linux). It would host a collection of programs that I'm building and install the OS and my programs on to the workstation.

Right now, I would like the base OS, basic CLI, no GUI or fancy stuff. I just want a lot of the functionality that Fedora has (systemctl, RPM, YUM, file structure, etc).

What would be the best way of going about this? I thought about using LFS for this, which would work, but I don't have the functionality I want and I'd like RPM to be a big part of the way I'd distribute updates.

That sounds like a big job. You would have to rebuild most all the packages from source with "rpmbuild" to remove any RedHat/Fedora references. Then build a live CD/DVD or install CD/DVD from those rebuilt packages with "livecd-tools" or "dracut" ,"createrepo" and "mkisofs"